Kids in Wes Anderson movies carry the weight of the world on their shoulders and lofty ambitions in their hearts.

The stunted siblings in The Royal Tenenbaums soldier on with the knowledge that they have a deadbeat dad. Rushmore’s Max Fisher writes and directs an epic Vietnam play and puts the moves on his high school teacher. They all seem old before their time, smarter than the adults, above the rules they’re forced to obey.

Sometimes those rules are just a bit too much to take. In Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson’s seventh feature and among his best, 12-year-olds Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward) are madly-in-love misfits with nothing to lose when they run away together. Sam is a bullied orphan who leaves a hand-scrawled letter of resignation for his scoutmaster (Edward Norton) when he abandons the Khaki Scouts. Suzy carries around her parents’ copy of Coping With the Very Troubled Child.

Geez. Grown-ups. Who needs ’em?

“These kids are advanced because they take this romance so seriously,” Anderson says by phone from Italy, where he’s unwinding after the Moonrise Kingdom premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. (The film opens Friday in Dallas).

“They’re so determined. But in general, the adults and children are on pretty equal footing. The adults have experience, maybe a little bit of wisdom, but not a lot. But the kids know what they want at least.”

The flip side of prematurely aged kids? Chronically immature adults. The posse of grown-ups on the trail of our young, would-be lovers, including Norton, Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand, Anderson regular Bill Murray and Tilda Swinton (a social services worker who goes by the name of “Social Services”), could use a lot more than a map to get where they need.

Even the ones who care remain ineffectual, at least until the grand finale. Of course, they’re all models of stability compared to Anderson’s most famous arrested-development case, Gene Hackman’s Royal Tenenbaum. It takes panache to pull a case of fake stomach cancer on your family.

Youngsters who talk like they’re 40 and oldsters who act like they’re 16 are by now part and parcel of the Anderson universe, a highly formalized place that warms the hearts of fans and sends detractors scurrying for something less precious. I’ve been on both sides of that divide: Bottle Rocket and Rushmore won me over quickly; The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited felt like hermetically sealed exercises in strained whimsy.

But I’ve found myself increasingly drawn to Anderson’s formal consistency, the sense that his movies couldn’t be made by anyone but him. You can see it in the way he places his protagonists dead center in the frame, a place of privilege but also vulnerability. Or his use of quick pans between characters — or, at the beginning of Moonrise Kingdom, between the dollhouse-like rooms in an old New England island house.

It all comes with an undercurrent of whimsical melancholy, a sense of life zooming by or disappointments piling up. For all of the quirks, Anderson’s films, including Moonrise Kingdom, are relentlessly sincere. The humor comes more from who says what than what’s actually said. “Damn us!” exclaims one of Sam’s fellow pipsqueak Scouts as he considers the ways they’ve ostracized the runaway. These tykes sound as if they’ve stepped out of an old war movie.

In giving his little ones such advanced worries and vocabularies, Anderson gifts them with a dignity rare in American movies. Moonrise is like an inverse Lord of the Flies: Left to their own devices, away from disengaged authority figures and indifferent bureaucracy, the kids discover that they are, indeed, all right.

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